Becoming
by FountainOfPens
Summary: Elloria Hallen has the worst luck.
1. I Ghostlands

A/N: This story will mostly follow OCs. It's basically a footsoldier's view of the void elves' creation and finding their way into the Alliance, as well as a coming-of-age story of sorts. If that sounds good to you, keep reading! Reviews are always appreciated :) Enjoy!

I. Ghostlands

In the course of her short life, Elloria Hallen had so far managed to accrue just one piece of good advice. And, well, it was so specific that it might only be applicable to maybe one hundred people over the whole course of time, so she wasn't even sure it could be called good advice, since it was so marginally useful. In any case, the advice was this: never take a security job with a bunch of shady magisters, no matter how much they say they're gonna pay you.

It'd occurred to her almost immediately after the eggheads had gathered everyone together and announced that they'd been exiled by order of His Lordship Lor'themar Theron that the money that had felt so solid weighing down her pack these past few months had as good as vaporized. Where would she spend it? Exile from Quel'Thalas was essentially exile from the Horde, and it wasn't like the Alliance was about to take in a few ragtag sin'dorei studying perverted magics. Why would they bother? As far as she could tell, the crackpots weren't getting any closer to their goal, whatever it was. And yeah, okay, maybe she could sneak out of camp one night and somehow get to Booty Bay or Shattrath or somewhere they didn't ask too many questions, but she'd have to pass through enemy territory, a term which now, _thank you so much Magister Umbric_ , covered most of Azeroth and beyond. So most likely they were all just gonna die out here, slowly, picked off one by one by Scourge or Forsaken or night elves or their own kin or even the stupid spiders and bats.

Elloria sighed deeply, rubbed her eyes, stretched, and continued her vigil. Her eyes swept indifferently over the gloom of the Ghostlands: dead grass, crumbling buildings, the vague light of An'owyn creeping around a hill. The land around the Sanctum of the Sun was flat and not very elevated, so not a great vantage point, but it didn't matter too much. The Scourge hadn't even left stumps of the trees that had once grown thick on this land, so it was possible on a clear day even to see one of the Runestones several miles away. There was practically no cover, nowhere to hide except maybe in one of the ziggurats fringing the edges of the Scar, and you were unlikely to find any of them unoccupied by Scourge. She could see a spider, huge and swollen and glowing violet with bad magic, digging its nest into the ground. There was nothing much to string their webs on that hadn't been claimed already by the nerubians, who were bigger and stronger, so the mutated creatures had learned to hide and trap, had started using their webs like nets. Of course more often than not whatever prey they snared was already dead, devoid of any nutrients, polluted. She looked away.

Mostly there wasn't much point in keeping watch. The Ghostlands were still dangerous, sure enough, but they mostly got left alone these days. The runners from Silvermoon carrying supplies had stopped coming ages ago, so they were subsisting mainly off of conjured mana buns (which, she noticed, got more tasteless and less filling the more you ate them), which meant there really wasn't much point in raiding their camp. Sometimes marauding bands of Scourge or mana-hungry elementals came through, but they would wander away soon enough if you just hid. The animals, feral and corrupted though they were, usually didn't bother them unless they were starving, in which case it was easy to make quick work and a quicker meal of them. Sometimes she wondered if it was dangerous to consume the meat of an animal that had lived on such blasted land, but she knew that she hadn't lived the kind of life that permitted her to turn her nose up at any form of nourishment. She snorted. Well, if she'd been the choosy type, she wouldn't be _here_ , now would she?

#

She'd started in provisions, which meant that she would go out into Dawning Lane, always during the daytime because the Wretched weren't out so much then, and she'd forage for anything that might still have a drop of arcane power in it. There wasn't much, but sometimes there was enough to distil into a mana crystal and sell to people who couldn't afford anything else. She'd gotten by that way for a while. And then when the Sunwell was reborn, she'd started to diversify. Thieving for hire and dabbling in the bloodthistle and manathistle trades. Got a minor reputation for herself as a fixer, someone who could do what needed to be done. No killing, but finding things and people that had gone missing. There was a huge market for that amongst the orphans and widows of Quel'Thalas, and amongst the higher-ups who wanted to reclaim their ancient heritage. She'd even done a job for the Reliquary once.

And that was probably how Umbric had heard her name. Probably one of those ungrateful bastards had drawled it over a glass of wine, with the unspoken words wafting through the garden: _and who'll care if something happens to_ her _?_ Well, she cared. A lot, actually. She really didn't want to die out here.

"Hallen! Look sharp!" Elloria whipped her head around to face Captain Dalrend Brighthammer. She really didn't like him, and he knew it. He was holding the point of his spear right to her neck with a grin so shit-eating it could've been the septic system for a whole city. "I could've had you dead in another second."

Elloria rolled her eyes and smacked the spear away. "Whatever, jackass. I'm almost off shift anyway." Dalrend narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, she jumped to her feet, grabbed hold of the spearshaft, and shoved hard, knocking him to the ground. "Happy now?"

The captain grunted. "Understand that the only reason I'm not hitting you back is that I need you to be on watch for another five minutes."

Elloria poked his neck with the tip of the spear. "One more word and I'm keeping this thing." Dalrend merely grunted again, but Elloria wasn't paying attention to him. She flipped the spear around, lifting the tip close to her face so that she could inspect it. "Looks new. Is this from An'owyn?"

Dalrend rose and tried to take the spear back from her, saying, "All right, all right, that's enough, Hallen—" but she whirled away, scrutinizing the weapon. The tip was plated with gold and red. As her eye moved across it, she suddenly saw the crest right at the base of the spear-tip. She froze as realization dawned. "It isn't, is it."

Dalrend sighed. "No. It's not." He shifted uncomfortably and added, "Farstrider Enclave."

Elloria thrust it back into his hands as though it had burned her. "You're a bastard."

Dalrend snorted. "Why should I care what you think, cutpurse? We have to survive out here somehow."

Elloria didn't look at him. "Yeah? Cutpurse I might be, but I wouldn't kill my own kind for a fancy spear."

He snorted. "Ah? So there _is_ honor among thieves. That's adorable. And in case you forgot, the rangers of Quel'Thalas are no longer _our kind_."

"Leave me alone."

"Fine." He turned to go, but before he faded into the dead land, he growled, "Please yourself, Hallen, but _I_ don't intend to die out here."

The nice thing about that, Elloria thought, is that it probably was not going to matter what he intended. Jackass.

#

"Drink, Hallen? I swiped some wine from the knife-ears on the last raid," said Corin. He waved the wineskin under her nose with a grin.

Elloria shook her head. "I don't drink." Spend enough time around addicts, and you either became one yourself or learned to avoid any mind-altering substance.

"What? That's against the rules of mercenarying, you know," he said jovially. Corin Ferion would know. He'd been in the business for years, and it showed. He was by now a huge mass of muscle and scar tissue, but he was surprisingly… nice. He'd been her first friend among the other mercenaries, and she still spent most of her free time with him.

Elloria just smiled a bit tight and shook her head. "'Salright, Corin. Spider legs are tasty tonight."

He laughed and said, "For a rogue, you're a really terrible liar, Hallen."

Elloria shrugged. "I don't usually have to lie, in my line of work. Don't have to lie to people about what you're doing if they never find out you're doing anything in the first place." She shoveled the rest of the spider legs down her throat and added, "So how was the raid, anyway?"

Corin scratched the back of an ear, sighed. "Usual. We didn't lose anybody, so that's nice."

She was quiet for a moment. Corin was a warrior, and a damn good one, so he usually got taken on the larger raids of surrounding camps. "Um. Did you know we raided Farstrider Enclave?"

His face darkened. "Yeah. That blustering idiot Brighthammer took a few of us." Seeing the questioning and slightly desperate look in her eyes, he added, "I didn't go with him. Even I have my limits." He was quiet for a few long seconds, taking deep draughts of the wine.

Elloria nervously wound the end of her ponytail around her fingers. "I mean… it's one thing to fight back if they attacked us. But they haven't yet, so…"

"Right. And, by the way, they might not have known about us before, but now they do. So." He raised the wineskin in a sarcastic toast.

They were silent for some minutes, leaving each other alone with their thoughts. Finally, Elloria burst out, "I mean what is his _deal_? He bothered me today at the end of my shift and he said he didn't intend to die out here, but then he goes and gives the Farstriders a reason to come here and kill us all? AndImean he was a ranger-captain himself! Aren't they all supposed to be brothers of the wilds, or something?"

Corin shrugged. "Wouldn't know about that, Lori. But apparently Dalrend was a bit of a black sheep even before he ended up here." He took another swig and looked at her gravely. "Gossip 'round the camp is that he was about to be expelled from the order when he joined up with us."

Despite herself, Elloria was curious. "Really? 'Spose it's not that surprising, given that he _did_ join up with us. What happened?"

Corin shrugged, took another drink. "I've heard a lot of things. Some say it was to do with something in Northrend. Others been saying he was involved with that business with Theramore. Kerin Northwind said he was involved in some shady dealings in Stormheim, up in the Broken Isles. Some top-secret stuff with the new Warchief." He leaned closer, lowered his voice. "All we know for sure is that Felinara Desidris overheard him talking with Umbric once. They were arguing, and apparently Umbric said some things. Said he had enough dirt to get that court-martial completed in Silvermoon. Threatened to write a letter to Halduron Brightwing about 'that business with Malina.' And apparently that shut him right up."

Elloria raised her brows. "Malina? Sounds like a human name."

Corin smirked darkly. "Yeah. No idea what it means beyond that, though." He lay down on his cot. After a short silence, he sighed and said, "You know, Hallen, we're all shady characters, or we wouldn't be here. But I really don't like that Brighthammer. Something really fishy about him."

Elloria remembered his expression the other day. The dark determination in his voice. "Yeah. He's a creep."

Corin smiled, raised the wineskin from his supine position. "I'll drink to that."

#

Elloria was jolted out of her troubled half-sleep by the sound of a commotion outside her tent. She crawled out of it to see a group of her colleagues crowded around Magister Umbric's tent. The atmosphere seemed tense, uneasy. She walked over and spotted Corin at the edge of the crowd. "Hey." She gave him a light whack on the shoulder, their traditional greeting. "What's up?"

"Flameblade's got everyone worked up," he muttered from the corner of his mouth. "She's demanding Umbric come out and speak to us. People are angry, want to know what the plan is."

Elloria crossed her arms over her chest and coughed up a disgusted laugh. "Plan? What plan? We're fucked, end of story. We were fucked from the second we signed up with the good magister."

Corin rolled his eyes. "I know. It's stupid. But I'm curious to see what he comes up with."

"Come out, Umbric! We want answers!" Flameblade yelled, raising her fist. She was a paladin, with every ounce of self-righteous fury the title implied. According to her, she had not yet been inducted to the Blood Knight order during the time they'd tortured a naaru for their powers, but nobody believed her. She was from a noble family and she claimed that she'd signed up with Umbric "in order to fulfill my mission to bring the Light to dark places," but everybody thought she'd probably done it to piss off her overbearing mother.

Elloria rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. "Oh whatever, I really can't watch this, her voice gives me a headache. I'm going back to sleep." She turned to go, but Corin put a hand on her shoulder.

"Nah, wait a second, Hallen. This could get interesting. And I don't want to have to tell you the whole yarn later," he said with a quick grin.

Elloria just rolled her eyes and punched his arm, her eyes already trained on the front of the tent.

"This is inhumane, Magister! We're honest people and you're keeping us in the dark!" screeched Flameblade.

"Oh yeah, bunch of thieves and thugs, most honest people around," Corin muttered from the side of his mouth.

"Who are you calling a thug?" Elloria quipped back sotto voce.

And they weren't the only two muttering. Flameblade was tapping her foot and glaring at the tent in lieu of breaking down its door, and everyone else was flicking their eyes from face to face, expectant and unsure of what they were expecting. There was something odd about the crowd and it took her a few minutes to figure it out: no magisters. One or two warlocks, the ones who weren't members of the Magisterium, or at least hadn't been for decades, but none of the magisters were anywhere you could see them. She tugged Corin's sleeve. "None of the eggheads are here."

His eyes darted back to hers. "Think they scarpered?"

Elloria narrowed her eyes, scanning the crowd and all the tents she could see from the center of the camp. Some of them were closed, and the ones that were open were either definitely empty or belonged to people she could see amongst the crowd. "I—I don't know—"

Corin clenched a fist. "If they did—" She didn't catch the end of his sentence, because finally she caught sight of a flash of red robe and the corner of a green eye. She moved her gaze away from the tent at the edge of camp where she'd seen them, but kept it in her sights, just at the edge of her vision. " _Where are the magisters?_ They got us into this mess, and now they've disappeared!" Flameblade was yelling to the crowd, but Elloria had shut everything out except for the little movements at the corner of her eye. Someone was meeting her gaze from behind the tent-flap. She kept her gaze on that of the hidden watcher for a long moment. She could not quite read the expression in the gaze, but it seemed… searching. Which offended her, a little. After all, the other elf was clearly the one with something to hide. She felt a little ridiculous glaring at the edge of an eye several feet away, with no clue who it belonged to, but she narrowed her eyes and glared anyway.

The noise around her mounted, but she did not break the gaze. After several long seconds, something suddenly changed in the other elf's eyes, or at least in the one eye visible to her. Before she could determine what it was, the eye flicked to the right and to the left, as if making sure that no one was watching, which in Elloria's opinion was ridiculous, because obviously, _she_ was. Then the other elf stepped forward so that she could see just slightly more of his face, enough to identify him as male. She could see high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, but the face was too thin to be truly handsome. Were it not for the color of his eyes and the slight pink of blood under his skin, she could have taken him for one of the Wretched. She could see the edge of his thin mouth, curled up in a strange smile.

Elloria's brow wrinkled in confusion. Who the hell was this guy, and why was he looking at her like that? Should she go over and ask him? As she debated what to do about this strange person giving her this strange look, a hand emerged from the gloom of the tent, then the edge of a sleeve of a red robe. _A magister_. His grin grew wider, and he waved to Elloria. Then, in a flash of magic, he disappeared from sight.

What the hell? How _weird_ was that? She could understand the desire to hide from the mob gathered by Flameblade, which was now growing pretty heated, but what _was_ all that? Confused and vaguely panicked, Elloria moved to step forward, intending to sneak over to the tent while the crowd was occupied with Flameblade's spectacle and investigate, but Corin grabbed her arm and hissed, " _Not now_ , are you stupid?" She turned her attention away from the strange magister and back towards Flameblade and her cronies at the front of the crowd. Flameblade was holding her sword over her head, poised to strike at the cloth of the tent in order to rip it open.

"Bad fucking plan," muttered Corin beside her, "doesn't she think they'd have set up wards against us common rabble, not to mention the hordes of monsters just wandering around this place?"

"Flameblade doesn't think," Elloria answered absently. She watched as Flameblade brought the sword down; and just as Corin had predicted, a burst of arcane energy knocked her back, thrusting the sword from her hand. But Flameblade was not deterred; eyes flashing, she growled, hauled herself up, and retrieved her sword. She stepped back a few paces, and the crowd made room for her; then, blade glowing with holy Light, she ran towards the tent and struck again—again, to no avail. The wards thrust her back even farther this time, straight into the body of Ellistian Rath, another mercenary, and they both fell back with a resounding "ugh!" But now others were starting to draw their weapons, unconsciously agreeing that perhaps if they could do enough damage to the wards at once, they would break under the strain. Elloria backed up and tugged an unresisting Corin along with her in anticipation of the magical blast.

But just as the elves at the front of the crowd were about to connect their weapons with the tent, they were all thrown back several feet from the tent with a violet explosion of arcane energy. Elloria and Corin lunged to the side just in time to avoid the sudden rain of their comrades' bodies.

As everyone was catching their breath, the tent flap finally opened, revealing Magister Umbric. He dusted off his robes in a way that subtly suggested that this was necessary for effect rather than cleanliness and announced, "My apologies, colleagues and friends. I understand your distress, but it was imperative that I prevent you from doing something in ignorance that you would regret in understanding." Impossibly, the level of tension, which Elloria had thought was already at breaking point, rose. She rolled her eyes. Gotta hand it to those eggheads: for sure, a dullard like herself could hardly attest to the great feats of intellect these men were supposedly famous for, but they sure were talented at pissing absolutely everyone off simply by opening their mouths.

Sensing that he was in immediate danger of decapitation, Umbric quickly added, "I see that you deserve an explanation, and I am happy to deliver. I have good news for you, if you will but stay your hands for a few minutes." He cleared his throat uncomfortably, but he had everyone's attention now. They could still, after all, strangle the pompous fucker after he'd finished speaking; no harm in hearing him out. Seeing that he was in the clear, albeit for now and on _extreme_ sufferance, Umbric began, "We have, after many long months, finally achieved a breakthrough. We have discovered a safe haven that will allow us to escape at last the monsters and the blades of our former kin. And this safe haven will allow us to delve deeper than ever before into the mysteries of the Void, empowering ourselves as well as whoever among you will follow us!" With a flourish, Umbric snapped his fingers, and the tent disintegrated into thin air, revealing a portal unlike any Elloria, or indeed any of the elves present, had ever seen.

It looked like a hole in space. At its violet edges, it seemed to be sucking the world around it into itself, just slightly blurring the surrounding air. She could sense the sickening hunger of the Void energies that composed it gnawing at everything around it, including her. In its black center she could see nothing… no, something more than nothing, deeper than nothing. Her very flesh recoiled from the sense of elemental wrongness emanating from the portal, and yet… yet she felt drawn to it. She could hear something, the edge of a voice or the ghost of one, whispering, though she could not make out its words. Over and above the flood of new sensations threatening to overwhelm her, Elloria could not shake the feeling that her life was going to _change_. She'd been through a lot, to say the least, multiple changes of profession and stretches of poverty and starvation, but she'd been able to live through it all because no matter what troughs of privation or crests of success she encountered, she had always been _herself_ , one and unchanging. Whatever her circumstances were on top, she had always been able to sequester and protect her true self, like the violet spiders who hid underground and survived, like a seed under the earth protected from the harshness of winter, like the very last breath of unstale air that keeps the drowning man alive long enough to reach the shore.

But she felt that if she followed these insane magisters through that portal, she would experience something completely new to her. That _she_ would change. And she was not sure what that would mean. Curiosity and dread, fear and hope, repulsion and desire swirled in the battered soul of Elloria Hallen, now blending, now breaking ranks, like paints mixing uneasily in water.

"Welcome, my friends," said Umbric, "to Telogrus."

Torn from her thoughts by Umbric's voice, and, quite frankly, too exhausted and in shock to control herself, Elloria yelled, "What in the thundering fuck is a Telogrus?"

#

The idea that your life could be completely and incontrovertibly altered via badly-written memo felt unfair, absurd, and above all offensive to Elloria. "They," she announced with assurance, arms akimbo, "have gone completely round the bend."

Corin, leaning against the wall behind her, snorted. "And you're just realizing this now?"

Elloria waved an irritable hand, scrunching her nose. "No, for real this time. Look. It's still addressed 'citizens of Quel'Thalas.' Which, uh, we've not been for three weeks." She poked at the magical image floating above their faces, which flickered then stabilized in response to her touch. It was indeed still addressed to "our esteemed colleagues, Citizens of the Kingdom of Quel'Thalas." They all knew by now that the magisters used a pre-formatted memo spell, but they usually put in some effort to alter the format to reflect small niceties such as the correct form of address used by the recipient(s) and the current political situation in Silvermoon. But this memo had been edited only hastily, such that you could easily see the ghosts of words removed or replaced floating above the living text of the message. Thus, it read:

 _Our esteemed colleagues, fellow_ (subjects) _citizens of Quel'Thalas,_

 _Now is the time! Now is the salvation, finally, of the elven races!_

 _We have at last opened the way to the broken planet Telogrus, whose secrets we shall claim_ (for the Crown) (for the Regent) _for ourselves! We will gain new insight into the power of the Void, which we believe will make us stronger and heal our ancient wounds._

 _Of you,_ (citizens of the Regency) _faithful colleagues, we ask only that you prepare your hearts and minds for what is to come. With regard to practical concerns, however: we are now three hundred elves strong. Most of you will join us on the opposite side of the portal, to aid us in exploring this brave new world. Some fifteen of you will stay behind to guard our camp from lingering monsters, in case we should need to return._

 _Prepare for the birth of a new age! Long live_ (the King) (our Prince, Kael'Thas Sunstrider, long may he reign) (our Lord Regent) _our mission!_

 _The Magisterium_

Corin spat. "Pathetic. Seriously. How old is that spell? Must be completely rancid."

Elloria bent forward, exaggerating the arch of her back, and waved her hand under her nose as though she was trying to coax a wine's bouquet into her nostrils. Corin laughed and she shook her head, scrunching up her nose and recoiling, saying in a haughty voice, "I couldn't sell that on Murder Row!"

A sudden silence dropped between them as they began to consider what these words really meant, snuffing the humor as a short sharp gust snuffs a weak candle-flame. Neither of them reached for the tinder-box just yet. Elloria was thinking, I don't want to go. I hate them for using all these fancy words and exclamation points, talking of _discovery_ and _adventure_. Adventure. Hah! Maybe they're scientists but the rest of us are just a bunch of luckless worthless know-nothing fucks. We ended up here because we were too poor or too stupid or too hopeless to end up _anywhere_ else. This isn't a fucking adventure for us. It's a last resort.

Corin was thinking, Teleporting makes me really sick. He was also thinking, I know bullshit when I see it. And this right here isn't just bullshit. It's kodo shit, a lot of it, and it stinks to high heaven. Then he thought, What am I going to do about Amelline? and crushed the thought so fast that the aggressive silence in his head rattled his teeth.

At last, a light. Elloria breathed a rough sigh through her nose and asked, "Are you staying, or… or going?"

Corin pursed his lips and shook his head. "I really don't know, Lori." He ran a hand through his long blond hair and shrugged. "I'm no damned scientist, and a couple hundred years of being a mercenary kicks the curiosity right out of you, sure enough. Tried and true'll see you through, that's my motto." His gaze floated anxiously towards the black portal, still standing stark in the center of the camp. In a quieter voice, he added, "And I'm old. Could be they're right and our salvation lies with the Void, but I don't like it and I never will. Period, end. I were paid to guard 'em and to sit outside and do the real fighting while they tinkered, not to be a damned mana wyrm."

"Mm." Elloria's gaze was trained on the portal as well. The blackness in the middle seemed to swirl and shift, seemed to contain, if such a thing were possible, different shades of black. She was constantly aware of its presence these days, keeping it always in her peripheral vision like an ex-lover across the room.

She realized Corin was staring at her. There was a strange, defeated look in his eyes that she didn't understand. But a second after her eyes connected with his, his face split into his usual sardonic grin. "Well. On the other hand, nowhere else to go, eh?"

"Right," said Elloria absently, her eyes drifting back towards the portal. "Nowhere else to go."

#

Some years ago she'd had this friend. A fellow skulker, one of the shadow people of Quel'Thalas, just like her. Celeste had also been a rogue, good enough to get noticed by Zelanis himself. Even though only idiots thought Zelanis the true king of Silvermoon's underworld, you couldn't deny his skill with blending into the shadows, mixing poisons. And then one day Celeste had started looking strange. Her eyes always seemed to be looking elsewhere, to a point far in the middle distance. Not like she was searching, but like she'd _found_ something.

She'd started swearing less and drinking less. Elloria had asked her about it one day, and Celeste had said, "I don't know. I just… I feel like I've been called." Elloria had asked, "Called where? By what?" And Celeste had shrugged.

Some days after that conversation, Celeste made the pilgrimage to Quel'Danas. While she was there, she applied to become an acolyte at the temple there, and been accepted. She became a priestess, a front-lines healer of no small renown.

Elloria had been taught that the Light could call you at any time, at any stage of life, even if your faith had previously been weak, even if the last time you'd set foot in a church or a temple had been your naming day. Supposedly the Light could call you and then that was it: everyone else you'd been, everything else you'd wanted, just melted away in the face of its brilliance. Until she'd seen it happen to Celeste, she'd never believed it. People don't just flip on a copper piece that way, she'd said. People are who they are. It's all a bunch of wonky nonsense the priests say to get us to respect them, so we think they know something we don't. But then she'd seen it, seen the way her friend had been there, struggling with her, surviving day to day, and then suddenly had gone somewhere utterly else. It was eerie, but she supposed it had to be respected. After all, the Light was good, right? It was _The_ Good. So of course it didn't matter if it yanked you away from yourself. That was all right and proper, yeah?

It had never occurred to her that you could also be called by something else.


	2. II Telogrus: Base Camp

II. Telogrus: Base Camp

Telogrus was cold, dry, constantly dark. So in many respects, at first, it seemed not really that different from the Ghostlands. Corin had said to her, "The key to any posting's just to remember it's the same as all the others. On this planet or any other, your job is to be a body." Which, Elloria thought uncharitably, was easy for him to say, since he was staying behind. She was angry at him for it, even angrier that she did not understand it, but she had little time to think much more about it, because the rest of her time was spent trying to sleep or trying to do various chores or tasks assigned to her by the magisters through Brighthammer while operating on two hours of uninterrupted sleep or less. Elloria was not the only one to suffer this difficulty. Flameblade, who had some rudimentary healing skills through her training as a paladin, shook her head and said, "We're used to being awake in the daytime. There is no daytime here. So our bodies are confused."

Exasperated, Elloria ran a rough hand through her hair and said tightly, "Well, can't you like, soothe us or something?"

Flameblade looked at her with a mix of pity and condescension. "You need a priest for all that woo-woo mind stuff."

Elloria felt like her brain matter was leaking through her ears. "Okay, so where's our priest?" It was unusual for any expedition leaving Silvermoon to do so without the protection of those who could commune with the Light most directly.

The pity faded out of Flameblade's gaze, the condescension moving to the foreground. The sluggish motors of Elloria's brain eventually caught up to the other woman's face. "Oh… right." Flameblade was the only servant of the Light among their number. For obvious reasons. Which meant that she was well and truly fucked.

Seeing the desolate look on Elloria's face, Flameblade, shockingly, relented. "What I can do is make you a medicinal tea and see if that will help."

It didn't.

#

The third or fourth day, the expedition's sleep started to improve, with the exception of the magisters, who were to an elf insomniacs in any case. However, there began to be other complications.

Elloria gave a final retch and remained on her hands and knees, panting. She closed her eyes and tried very hard not to breathe in the rancid smell of her stomach contents. Former stomach contents. She pushed her fingers into the dirt and thought about toxicology.

Brighthammer accused her of cutting purses but most often she was better served by snatching books. The libraries of the Magisterium and the Church of the Light were chiefly safeguarded against unauthorized entry by magical means, not smallish girls with mousy brown hair and forgettable faces who asked to come pray or claimed they had to pick up a text for their sisters. Anyway, she always brought the books back. Mostly.

Obviously, in order to retrieve lost objects and people, she often had to do research. But that wasn't why it'd started, not really. There were also her first attempts at using a dagger, and the realization she'd had almost immediately subsequent to that, which was: you don't need to be that accurate if your blades are drenched in sleeping potion. You just needed to break the skin. That had led to her experimenting with different brews, beginning to learn the uses of plants. She'd needed to finish her education. Except instead of finishing it, she'd kept it going, creeping into the restricted sections, where they kept the books even the professors and the elite mages in service to the Regency consulted for reference. Oh, she never looked over the spells themselves, having neither talent nor training for the manipulation of the arcane, but she'd found that the highest-level theory books often had lots of funny ideas about what herbs could enhance what spells, and so they often discussed and argued about their properties. In truth, she began to steal from the libraries more often than she needed to. In truth, she read over the pages of her favorite texts until they were thin as onionskin, and even now, she remembered some passages verbatim. From her first herbs textbook, meant for first-year magic students:

 _Arid climates are characterized by a fierce competition for water. In many ways, flora are favorite candidates for the competition's victor; they are more easily able to store water and to survive for much longer under harsh conditions, since their energetic needs are so much less than those of fauna. However, flora have fewer inherent defenses than do fauna, lacking principally the ability to move. They therefore deter all but the most persistent or desperate of enemies by means of structural, chemical, and magical defenses…_

 _The Her'tzul shrub, native to Tanaris, covers itself in a thin layer of toxins, which are capable of entering the body through the skin. Over time, as the shrub reproduces in a given area, the soil becomes so saturated with its toxins and the chemicals that any animal who even dares graze near the plants will die…_

Will die within days. The dirt was so far under her fingernails. She had no idea what poisons were threaded through this soil, this sand. Also:

 _The cautious naturalist never meddles with that which she does not recognize or understand thoroughly. The passionate naturalist may be unable to resist._

She convulsed, and only a few seconds later realized that she had not done so due to illness, but rather in reaction to a sudden touch at her shoulder. She whipped her head around fast, still-weak muscles tensing as much as they were able, opened her mouth to deliver what her mother would have called "a right hidin," and saw Dalrend looking down at her without expression.

"Hallen," he said gently, "are you pregnant?"

She was still feeling weak, so she did not actually have the energy to rear up and punch him, but she gave it a good firm effort nonetheless. An effort which, nonetheless again, was easily forestalled by a tightening of his grip on her shoulder. She turned her head as far as it would go in an attempt to spit on his hand, but he merely switched shoulders, jerking his left hand off her body and swinging his right hand down firmly onto her other shoulder like a gavel. She growled and was at last ready to try words: "Of course not, you idiot! This place is poisoning me. This place is _poisoning me_ , and you have the nerve—"

Brighthammer shrugged and said in a neutral tone, "Just ruling out possibilities. And you're puking a lot more than anyone else so far."

Elloria rolled her eyes nearly through 720 degrees and spat, " _Dose_."

He merely raised his eyebrows and said, "Hallen, you're babbling."

She shook her head and sat up, wiping off her mouth with her forearm. "'Mnot. Dose makes the poison. I'm prob'ly smallest one here by height and weight." This did not seem to mean anything to him, so she elaborated, "I'm smaller, so a greater effect is observed at the same dose than for a bigger person."

"Hmm." He looked uncomfortable, then asked, "You been to see Flameblade about it?"

She nodded weakly. "She says she's a warrior, not a healer."

"I see." He sighed and rose. "Well, are you feeling well enough to go on watch?"

Elloria licked her lips, then slowly shook her head. "I'm still feeling sick."

Dalrend looked annoyed, but shrugged and said, "I'll have you on double shifts when you're feeling better, but I suppose you're excused for today."

Which was good, because Elloria had an idea.

#

It was no trouble to nick the vials and burners she needed from one of the magisters' tents. She set up quickly inside her tent, placing flasks on ringstands, dipping a brush in washable ink and busily labeling. She was not an alchemist, but her poisons instructor had said: "If you want to have the knowing of poisons, girl, you'd better have the knowing also of sterile glassware and good labeling." She was right, too. You couldn't mess around with poisons if you didn't know how to keep from poisoning yourself. Or not for long, anyway.

Once she'd set up, she thought about simply using the dirt still stuck under her fingernails, but reconsidered. A clean sample would work best, even if seeing what would happen to the skin cells caught in the vial would also be useful information. She did not reconsider leaving her tent closed, though it was at a minimum unwise to mess around with potentially toxic materials without some kind of ventilation, because she wanted to do this on the sly. When she was done, she wrapped the shadows around herself and snuck out of camp. There was a little outcrop a mile or so away, and since most of the elves stayed within a few feet of the camp most of the time, she figured she could find dirt over that way which wouldn't be contaminated. When she reached her destination, she knelt and popped the vial open. She rummaged in her pockets and found a small spadelike gadget, which she slowly pushed out of its silk shrink-wrapping, and used it to push small piles of dirt into the vial, careful not to touch the sides. She had always been neat. Well, if that was the word for it, because she was "neat" to the degree that she wouldn't let anyone in her room as a child, because they'd inevitably touch or move something in some infinitesimal way which would feel like a needle being shoved beneath her fingernails. She'd gotten older fast and learned quickly that the world she'd been born into had little patience for such whims, but the shade of that finicky little girl remained in her still, taking pleasure in the way she was able to keep surfaces separate, to be clean and sure in her movements. Carefully she returned the lid to the vial and secured it firmly before heading back to camp.

She had a plate of eight antivenins which she'd made herself from a cosmetics container. There was a one-ounce sample of each in liquid form in the grooves which had once held kohl eyeliner or shadow; eight emergency swabs were stacked in the thinner, shallower groove which was meant to hold a brush; and inside the lid, there was a series of neatly folded miniature sheets of paper, on which Elloria had written, in the smallest letters she could manage, her most effective recipe for each. Of course she carried the antivenins for herself, in case she had an accident while mixing her poisons or in the relatively unlikely event that someone else's blade bled toxins into her veins, but they were also useful for evaluating the toxicity of foreign compounds. Six of the eight antivenins were reactive with particular kinds of magic rather than with specific compounds, so she could often determine whether and how a particular compound was toxic with a simple chromatography test. With practiced ease, Elloria whipped a clean sheet of paper from her pack and tweezed ten tiny piles of sample along its length, each containing just a few measly grains of sand each. Then she retrieved ten swabs from her pack and dotted each one into an antivenin, dotted a drop or two onto a pile of sample, discarded the swab and started the process over with a clean one. She had one pile for each antivenin, one for water, and one for control, a sample she'd leave dry and unadulterated. After a moment's hesitation she took out a pen and ink and marked the left corner of the paper with "1" and the right with "10." All she had to do for that test was wait, so she busied herself with the setup of a few other kinds of testing. Since she had little idea of what might compose the planet's soil beyond "some Void magic," she was using a methodology which she privately referred to as "everything _and_ the kitchen sink," which never got a laugh. This methodology involved subjecting the sample to as many different stresses and kinds of chemical as possible.

Nothing happened immediately. All the samples looked the same, but slightly damper than they had been. But it usually took at least a half an hour for whatever was going to happen to do so. All she could do was wait.

#

Her foot was stinging. Her foot was _stinging_ , sweet Sunwell, what the fuck? She opened her eyes and froze for a moment in shock. She'd fallen asleep while her samples were marinating, but she couldn't see them anywhere. What she could see was an enormous, black, shimmering pool of void energy slowly beginning to subsume her foot. She shrieked and tried to jerk her foot out of the pool, but to her horror something sucked it back in, and hit her with another, stronger burst of pain to boot. Desperate, Elloria started scrabbling, trying to stand, but this seemed to anger whatever was trapping her even more, and she slumped again.

 _Pain. Pain like exploding stars, through her whole body now. Her vision clouded and she could hear strange sounds that she was pretty sure weren't coming from outside her tent._ The vision must be fulfilled. The sleeping city will wake. The sleeping city will wake. The sleeping city…

 _She was trying to cry out but had no evidence that any sound was leaving her throat other than the sudden soreness of her muscles. The pain was growing… not growing, changing. It was like a writhing seed in her chest, spreading dark tentacles through her. She would not be herself. Something was taking her. Not just taking her, but taking her over._

 _Terror pulsed in her blood, ricocheting to the rhythm of the thought:_ You will not be yourself. _This thing, this voice (these voices?), this very dark and very_ old _magic, was striking at the heart of her and burning her away. She could feel every piece of herself burning, being erased, being changed._

 _But just as suddenly something began to rise in her, from her. It took form, rushing and solidifying to meet the darkness, and it was the word_ NO _. She had always and only been herself. She was Elloria Hallen, and she had always survived._

 _She was going to fucking survive. She reached towards the magic with the magic in herself, her birthright as a sin'dorei. It might not work but she had to try something to stop this thing. She reached out towards where she thought the pool was and she pulled it towards herself, trying to drain the mana away, trusting that her body would absorb the shock—_

 _She was wrong._

 _She screamed and screamed and screamed_

#

"Ah, Miss Hallen. You're an idiot, and also apparently awake."

The voice was strange as in unfamiliar, but it was also strange in its cheerfulness despite the insult. Blinking groggily, Elloria became aware of a strange elf's face looming over her. He was seated next to her, one foot folded over and resting on his knee, looking at her with a smugly arched eyebrow. He had a truly awful haircut, his brown hair flopping into his eyes with twee whimsicality, and his eyes loomed huge and odd, dominating his face and giving him a permanently curious expression. He was wearing magister's robes, so she figured it was appropriate.

Elloria's pride twanged at his words and she closed her eyes, drawing the blankets around herself and turning away from him, muttering, "Fuck off, egghead."

"Ah-ah-ah!" She did not need to see him to know that he was sarcastically wagging a finger at her. "That's _Magister_ Egghead to you." She could hear the frown in his voice as he added, "Well, Magister Cyranos Lightblood."

Elloria sighed. Well, apparently she had survived whatever had occurred, which was good, but waking up to this almost made her wish she hadn't. She turned back towards him, looked him right in the eye, and replied, "So sorry, Magister Lightblood, sir. I meant you should walk all the way to the edge of this forsaken planet, jump off, drift in the Nether for a thousand years, and _then_ go fuck yourself, sir."

To her surprise, he actually laughed. "What a creative insult!"

They sat in silence for a long moment before Elloria said, "So are you going to tell me what happened, or are you just gonna sit there? Which, also, _why_ are you here, exactly?"

His face, which had been aglow with strangeness and good humor, collapsed into a more professional expression. "You apparently tried to drain mana from a pool of rancid Void magic. I'm curious as to how that pool appeared in the middle of your tent. Also, Lady Flameblade needed to sleep and wanted me to watch you in case you died while she napped."

Elloria snorted. "Thanks. Who found me?"

"Captain Brighthammer, apparently. He'd thought you were faking sick so he went to check on you. Then he heard you screaming and opened the tent to find you glowing with Void magic and writhing, so he called Lady Flameblade and us. You didn't manage to take that much into your system, so we were able to drain the corruption out of you." She shuddered at the word "drain," but he continued, "So what were you doing? Or trying to do, at any rate."

She sighed. "I was testing the soil. I was trying to see what was making me sick. Us sick."

He frowned and leaned forward a bit, curious. "Testing it? How?"

She considered not telling him, working on the general principle that the magisters and the rest of the expedition kept each other on a need-to-know basis, but figured it wouldn't much matter. "I keep a set of antidotes with me. I brew my own poisons, so it's for safety reasons mostly, but I also use it to try to identify unknown poisons or magics. I just dabbed a bit of each on some of the soil. Usually takes some time for whatever reaction's gonna happen to occur, so I fell asleep waiting. And then… well, whatever happened woke me up."

He nodded slowly. "I see. That explains things."

Elloria blinked. "Um, how exactly?"

Magister Lightblood gave a slight shrug and said, "Well, not being a mage yourself, you probably aren't smart enough to understand."

Elloria blinked again, this time in shock and umbrage. She knew the magisters thought that—hell, she knew _mages in general_ thought they were smarter than everyone else, but usually they liked to dress it up in fancy words. She took a deep breath, pinched the bridge of her nose, and said, "Has anyone ever told you you're incredibly rude?"

Bizarrely, Lightblood gave her a bright smile. "Oh yes! Everybody, really. Especially my mother." Seeming to realize that something more was required, since Elloria didn't respond, he added, "I meant no offense. I'm… not too good with people."

Elloria raised a brow. "I hadn't noticed."

He looked confused. "Really? I mean you just said I was rude, so—"

"I was being sarcastic."

Lightblood kind of slumped, steepling his fingers and tapping them together. "Oh. I'm not too good with sarcasm either."

Elloria was usually pretty quick to anger and slow to forgiveness, but something about this man made her irritation at his words evaporate. "Hey, it's okay. Um, I'm not too great with people either."

This seemed to cheer the strange young magister. "Really? I'm glad to hear that!" Seeing her expression, he amended, "I mean, I'm sorry for you, but I'm sort of relieved to meet someone else who's weird."

She thought about protesting that designation, but then she saw the earnestness, even hope, in his expression, and thought better of it. She smiled and said, "Yeah. I know how you feel." She felt strange trying to have a real conversation while lying down, so she started to shuffle her way to a sitting position. Lightblood exclaimed, "Oh! Let me help you, you must still be feeling weak," and put his arms under her armpits. It was hard to resist the immediate impulse to slap him away, but her limbs did feel like jelly and he was only trying to help, so she let him drag her up so she was leaning against the head of the cot. "Thanks."

"Oh of course, Miss Hallen," he said, settling back into his own seat. He cocked his head at her and said, "So you thought the soil was poisoning you and your first instinct was to test your hypothesis? That is very magister-y thinking!"

Elloria laughed, surprised. "Why, what should it have been?"

Lightblood laughed too and said, "Well, I don't know. You could have sneaked into Magister Umbric's tent and gone through his notes?"

Elloria smirked. "Wish I'd thought of that."

Lightblood returned her look with a sly one of his own. "You're joking, Miss Hallen! I can tell because you made that face before when you were being sarcastic."

She laughed and said, "You're right, I am. I did think of it, but I thought I'd die if I read one more word that blowhard wrote. And call me Elloria."

Lightblood covered his mouth to hide a shocked giggle and replied, "Then you should call me Cyranos. And I agree! For such an esteemed graduate of the Magisterium, Umbric really is a terrible writer."

They kept talking until Umbric and Brighthammer arrived to interrogate Elloria further about the accident. As they spoke, Elloria was surprised at how expressive he was. In general, magisters made up a significant portion of Silvermoon's diplomatic corps, but there was nothing hidden or stoic about Cyranos. She found out that he was about her age, but he seemed much younger. And she discovered that he was an engaging conversationalist, despite his considerable quirks. Against all the odds, it seemed she had found a friend amongst the eggheads.

#

Elloria had never been good at standing up for herself. Truth be told, she'd been stiffed quite a few times when she was trying to make a name for herself. She didn't take it lying down exactly, but more often she exacted some kind of covert revenge, such as stealing back whatever she'd been hired to retrieve, nicking something less likely to be missed, or at her most juvenile sneaking a stink bomb onto the doorstep. But she found it easy, somehow, to stand up for Cyranos. The rangers and warriors who made up the bulk of the non-spellcaster faction of the expedition did not like that they were suddenly seeing him around a lot more due to his friendship with Elloria, but if someone even gave him the stinkeye, Elloria would glare back and lay a protective hand on Cyranos's shoulder. _He's with me._ He didn't totally seem to understand what was happening, though he did get that he was not liked among the hoi polloi. But he wasn't much liked among the mages and warlocks either, so this did not bother him overmuch.

She'd actually been surprised to learn that he didn't play so well even with the other magisters. In many ways, he exemplified the traits she associated with being one, these being in the main high intelligence, a certain coldness of manner, and that strange mix of superiority, dependence, and naïveté common to scholars of all stripes. But the bracing honesty and genuine curiosity and enthusiasm she appreciated in him apparently got under their skin.

"I mean," she'd asked him over dinner, "don't you _need_ to be honest if you're a researcher? Isn't your whole thing finding the truth?"

Cyranos smiled and shook his head. "No. Researchers find facts. We don't find the truth." His gaze dropped away from hers and he added, "And I don't know. I just seem always to put my foot wrong around them. I say things and they exchange looks or laugh when I'm not trying to be funny." He shrugged.

"Well. Fuck 'em," Elloria said, smiling encouragingly.

Cyranos smiled weakly but did not meet her gaze. "It's not that simple, Elloria. I know that my career within the Magisterium has been… stalled. Because I make people uncomfortable sometimes. I've tried to point out that it is unfair, but people just look away or shrug. And it's moot now anyway."

Elloria hugged her knees, tapping the sides of her calves thoughtfully. "I mean, look, did you really _want_ to be some big name in the Magisterium? They're not exactly nice guys. And you are, Cyranos."

Cyranos frowned. "I thank you, but quite frankly, I think that my abilities and my ideas warrant attention. I don't desire power, but I do want respect, and the chance to pursue my own projects…"

He paused and a suspicion dawned. "Rather than being forced to tag along on Umbric's wild goose chase," Elloria finished for him.

"Yes."

In a smaller voice, Elloria asked, "What would have happened if you'd refused to come?"

Cyranos shrugged. "Umbric is my advisor. He was the only senior magister who would take me on as an apprentice. I am not certain what would have followed, but my career in research would have been over, and I would have gone back home." He rubbed his neck roughly, trying to work out some anxious energy. "I would have been a burden."

Elloria thought about this for a moment. Sure, he'd been born into a noble family, had never scrounged, had never starved, but she could relate to the frustration he felt. Like him, she felt that her life was dictated by outside forces who were using a logic that would never be explained to her; a logic that was fundamentally indifferent to her. He had also been dragged here because a choice that was no choice at all had been thrust in front of him. He had also been treated like a thing.

"Though… to be fair to Umbric, we are beginning to get… results."

Elloria's head jerked up. "What do you mean?"

#

"We think it is some kind of gateway," said Cyranos, gesturing towards the glowing cube in front of them. Or rather, it was eight smaller cubes, held together by the eerie bluish light which suffused its entire surface to create, it seemed, a single entity. It was almost as tall as Elloria herself and as wide, but it was floating a foot above the ground. Strange runes skittered and shifted across its surface. It was not, so to speak, on the face of it a worrying thing; but the longer she stared at it, the more unsettled she felt. It wasn't just that she knew this object was infused with the power of the Void. It was that she seemed to feel drawn toward it, as she had toward the portal. She had to resist an intense urge to reach out and touch it. Just on the edge of her hearing, she seemed to sense… whispers. She could feel something poking at her mind. It reminded her of her little accident and she did not appreciate it.

She tried to keep the snap out of her voice as she asked, "And why would you want to muck around with that sort of thing? Aren't we already on another planet? Unless it goes back in time so we can prevent ourselves from getting in this mess to start with, I don't see what we need a gateway for."

Cyranos frowned and said, "Well, I don't think it can take us back in time, though we don't really know what it _can_ do yet. But perhaps it leads to more knowledge. A library, perhaps, of texts written by other beings who understand the Void better than we do. That's the best-case scenario, I think."

Elloria sputtered a laugh. "Okay. Interdimensional library, fine. What's the worst case?"

He tapped his chin. "Not sure. Probably that it leads nowhere."

She raised her eyebrows. "Really? No freaky thing with tentacles just waiting to consume us all?"

He laughed. "We are not completely without caution or prudence, Elloria. We did attempt to determine whether anything conscious lurked on the other side, wherever that may be. We found nothing."

Elloria nodded slowly at first, then more quickly. "Okay, Cyr." She grinned and moved to slap his back, remembered that he hated it, and patted him as lightly as possible on the shoulder. "But I'm holding you to it. If some big fucker comes after us, I'm gonna smack you."

He raised his hands in exasperation and replied, "Why you think fake threats are funny is beyond me."

#

"Hallen! Hallen, fuck me, wake up _absolutely right now_!"

Dalrend Brighthammer was… an aggressive personality, to say the least, but he usually wasn't physically shaking her awake, and this was the last goddamn straw. Before she even opened her eyes she was saying, "What the fuck—"

" _Something's happening_."

And that was the last thing she heard before she was screaming screaming screaming


	3. III Lion's Pride Inn

III. Lion's Pride Inn

It was dark, and her head was hurting. It was cold. She raised a careful hand to the back of her head and felt something liquid. Not a good sign. It was so black in here that she could not see. She tried to drag herself to a sitting position and slumped back down, the pain drowning her senses. The pain ricocheted between sharp and dull and all-consuming. She was confused and tired and hurting just, so much and she wanted to cry.

And now there were footsteps coming from somewhere outside. Her hand went to her hip and she could not feel her daggers or their sheaths. Paralyzed with fear and frustration, she waited.

"Oh, Elloria. You fell through the bed again. Just a moment—"

The voice had been familiar.

#

She woke up again. She remembered that the last time she'd touched her head, she had felt something that was probably blood. She tried to sit up.

Someone she could not see appeared from somewhere and felt her forehead. The hands were cool. Very cool, like they had just been in the cold. "Sleep now." She did.

#

Again it was dark. Had she gone blind? She waved her hand in front of her face and she could see the movement, just barely, so no, she had not gone blind. Once again she tried to sit up. Pain, and dark, and silence.

#

She could hear voices.

"Is she going to wake up?"

"Magister Lightblood, we're doing all we can. Her… previous exposure to the Void took a toll. Her… change… was further along."

"Well, just, keep working, okay?"

The air moved, and someone took her hand. "I miss you."

#

Her body didn't feel right. Ache after ache. She tried to shift position but she felt herself changing. She tried to look over and saw her hand passing through the bed into the mattress in the blue moonlight. It was impossible, she was dreaming. She withdrew her hand, then tried to grab the mattress again, only to have her hand pass through. Oh god. Oh god.

She panicked and she began to fall. Her head cracked against the floor and she lost consciousness.

#

She woke up. The first thing she saw was the ceiling, which felt anticlimactic. The light in the room was warm. She was in a bed and the sheets were cool. Nice.

First she tried to move her arms. She ran them along the sheets, and when this did not bring a terrible surge of pain with it, she decided to try sitting up. Slowly, she started to slide up the head of the bed. Her muscles felt weak and creaky.

She was almost upright when the door opened. It revealed—well, not much. The person who was now walking into this room was wearing a capacious grey cloak with a long hood that concealed their features. Her hand went to her hip again, and again she felt nothing but cloth, but the person suddenly stopped and cried, "Elloria!"

Before she could react, the grey cloak rushed toward her and enveloped her in a hug. She began to struggle, but there was something she recognized in that strange, echoing voice. She could smell the familiar scent of old books and that horrible cologne Cyranos used—"Cyranos?" she asked, her voice hoarse and small.

"Yes!"

"Cyranos." She dragged him closer and hugged him tight. It felt like it had been ages since she'd spoken to another person, trapped for so long in that world of impenetrable blackness, impenetrable pain. She whispered, "Cyranos, what happened to us? Why was I hurting so much?"

He looked pained. "All I can say for now is that everything is—all right, Elloria. You are safe and you are getting better."

Elloria nodded weakly and pulled away from their embrace to rub at her mucky eyes. "How—how long? How long was I… sick?"

"You have been semiconscious for a week," he said gravely. But his expression shifted rapidly to one of joy and he added, "But you are awake now, which is wonderful because I have decided that I love you! We must get you some food, see if you can keep something solid down—"

Elloria put up a hand. "Wait, wait, wait. Stop. You have… _decided_ that you _love_ me?"

Cyranos nodded excitedly. "Yes!"

At a loss, Elloria closed her eyes and started to massage her temples. "Okay," she breathed. "You love me. Cyranos, has it occurred to you that that is not the kind of thing people just kind of say outta nowhere?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I only ever said it to my parents, and there did not seem to be any special time for such words."

"Right," said Elloria, trying to be gentle, feeling slightly insane, "but I am not your parents, Cyranos. So it's not really clear, when you say that, what kind of love you mean."

"Okay…" he said in an expectant tone, urging her to continue explaining.

Elloria took a calming breath and continued, "Do you love me in a—a romantic way? Or just, like, in a friendship way?"

Cyranos tapped his chin thoughtfully beneath the hood of the cloak. "I'm not sure. Perhaps there is something of both in my love for you. I wish always to be near you, and I believe there is very little I would not do to ensure your happiness. But romantic love is possessive usually, is it not? I don't feel possessive of you."

Okay. Good start, Elloria thought, but what I really want to know is if he's sitting there having... _thoughts_... about me. She found it hard to imagine Cyranos doing such a thing—she had never heard him even make reference to desiring someone—but you just never could tell with men. She opened her mouth to continue, but he continued speaking, adding, "But I do feel protective of you. I was very frightened when it seemed like you might die. I even changed your bedpan. So—"

Pushing past the horrifying thought that she'd had a bedpan, and that this man that she had known for all of two weeks had been responsible for changing it, Elloria finally blurted out, "Do you want to have _sex_ with me, Cyranos?"

He blinked at her, slightly bemused. "Uh, no."

Elloria closed her eyes, breathing a sigh of relief. "Good. That's all I wanted to know."

He shook his head and said fondly, "You are so strange." Then he clapped his hands and added, "Food. I will fetch you some soup! They have this delightful one made out of peanuts downstairs, I'm sure that will make you feel so much better!" He darted abruptly out of the room, presumably to go and fetch the delightful soup.

It did not occur to her until much later that there was something wrong about his voice, and that beneath his hood, the glow of his eyes appeared blue instead of green.

#

It was sometime in the small hours of the morning and Elloria woke with a mighty need to piss. She stumbled over to the en-suite lavatory (an indoor bathroom! Had she ever seen such luxury?) and did her business without even turning the light on, navigating by the rich shadows and moonlight so as not to sting her eyes. Looked like a bright night, she noticed. The moonlight made her skin look bluish.

She finished up and she couldn't find the hand soap after pawing around for a good few minutes, so she snapped her fingers. At any inn in Quel'Thalas, this would have alerted a magical signal to light any lamps in the room. But this time it didn't work. _So_ , she thought, _we're not in Quel'Thalas_. It was an unlikely possibility, seeing as how none of them appeared to be in prison, but Cyranos had not actually mentioned where they were. He hadn't really told her much about what had happened at all, claiming that the healer had told him, "If you get her thinking about anything other than soup for at least the next several hours, I will personally tear your throat out." "And," he'd added gravely, "I don't think that it was one of those play-threats you like to do."

She finally noticed a gas lamp on a little shelf to the left of the sink, and turned its little switch. She washed her hands and rubbed her face once her hands were clean. As she finished and looked up at the mirror, she stopped cold.

Her skin was purple. Like she had bruised every inch of herself. Her hair, which had been mousy brown, was now a medium blue so intense it stung her eyes. And her eyes… her eyes, which had borne the fel taint of the sin'dorei, now glowed blue instead of green. It had taken her a full minute to recognize her own face in the mirror. Shocked, she stroked a hand against her cheek. The image in the mirror did the same in reverse.

Perhaps this first inkling of the profound changes her time on Telogrus had wrought should have brought something eloquent and profound to her lips. But at bottom, Elloria was just a little thief from the slums, so she said in a shaky voice, "My fucking hair is blue. My fucking _hair_ is _blue_." Panicking, she jerked away from the mirror and dashed out the lavvy door. She yelled, "Cyranos? Cyranos!" When no answer from her friend seemed forthcoming, she ran out into the hall, head lashing wildly back and forth for a few long seconds until she realized she had no idea where Cyranos's room was. Deciding she would just knock at every door until she found the right one, she dashed up to the door next to her own and rapped hard against the wood, yelling, "Cyranos! Cyranos, are you—"

And then her body dematerialized, and she fell through the door.

#

"Hallenwhatthefuck?"

Still woozy from her sojourn out of incorporeality, Elloria blinked up into a scandalized blue face. After another few confused moments, she recognized the face of Dalrend Brighthammer in the strange blue skin and violet hair. She coughed, noted that he did not appear to be wearing a shirt, and said, "Brighthammer, I'm really sorry, I—"

He took a big breath and said, "I know what happened. I was just surprised." He rubbed his forehead and added, "I didn't know you were… awake, yet."

Elloria crawled into a sitting position, drawing her knees to her chest, and said, "Well, I'm glad you know what happened, because I sure as shit don't." Unable to contain herself, she blurted out, "I just woke up yesterday and I have no idea what's going on and I am really, really fucking scared."

Brighthammer looked down at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Elloria looked back up at him, more than faintly horrified that she had confided this way in Brighthammer of all people. Then he sighed and said, "We'll start with some water."

#

It was like this. The magisters had been working on that puzzle-box that Cyranos had shown her when they sensed someone passing through to Telogrus. It had turned out to be Lady Alleria Windrunner and a hero of the Alliance, some little human witch, that she'd suckered into following her around the Ghostlands as she searched for Umbric and his ship of fools. Excited to have among them both the mortal who currently knew the most about the Void and arguably Quel'Thalas's greatest living hero (a designation which carefully skirted the issue of Alleria's younger sister, current Warchief of the Horde) in the person of Lady Windrunner, Umbric had ushered her over to the box to show off their work. The surge of power provided by Alleria's nearness and Umbric and the magisters' efforts had released the entity which had been bound by the box. And upon being freed, the entity had immediately begun to tear everyone's souls from their bodies, attempting to turn them into Void remnants like himself: incorporeal always-hungering beings who existed to destroy all life.

Alleria and the human had managed to stop the transformation from being completed, but they had been too late to reverse it entirely. The Void had left them some, and it had taken much from them: it had given them the ability to walk through walls without the ability to control when they dematerialized into Void energies. Alleria Windrunner had promised them knowledge and control of these strange new abilities, in return for which they, the "ren'dorei," would agree to use them in service of the Alliance. "Which," Dalrend finished, "leaves us as these strange mongrels. Not quite elves, not quite creatures of the Void. Definitely not members of the Horde anymore, tolerated among the Alliance only on sufferance. Something more than sin'dorei, and a great deal less."

Elloria was quiet for a long moment. In the course of telling his tale, Dalrend had come and sit on the floor with her, leaning against the edge of his bed while she leaned on the door. She didn't notice that somehow over the course of their conversation their feet had moved from being almost a foot apart to barely an inch apart. She was aware that this was still the man who'd killed his former brethren for a spear, but honestly, she needed comfort so badly that she didn't totally care who it came from. And Dalrend was being patient with her, albeit in a kind of distant way. He refilled her water and answered her questions as best he could in a calm, carefully neutral voice, even joking with her a little to try to ease her tension, which he did now, adding with a grin, "And a lot of us have blue hair now."

She reluctantly smiled back, picking up a piece of her own hair and waving it whimsically at him.

He raised a wry brow and said, "For what it's worth, that shade of blue does look rather fetching on you."

Elloria raised a brow of her own and replied, "It's worth nothing, since I didn't ask you to comment on my appearance." She made a show of tapping her chin thoughtfully and finished, "And purple really is _not_ your color."

"Point taken, cutpurse," he said, a shade disgruntled, like he was trying to take the joke but her words had gotten too far under his skin.

Speaking of jokes that got too far under one's skin: "I really wish you'd stop calling me that, Brighthammer. Should I start calling you 'Beastfucker'?"

Dalrend snorted, tense expression dissipating. "Like to see you try to make it stick."

Elloria snickered. "Think I won't, Beastfucker? Because I will, Beastfucker."

He waved a hand dismissively. "It doesn't roll off the tongue. Poor cadence. It'll never catch on."

"Fair point." Silence descended between them again as Elloria found the question she'd been avoiding and considered whether she wanted to ask it. In a slightly strained forced-casual voice, she asked, "Did everyone survive the change?"

Dalrend's face abruptly lost its expression of wry good humor. "No." He sighed. "Flameblade is dead. The Light magic in her body decided she was better dead than Void. Some of the magisters. All of the mercenaries who were guarding the portal on the other side."

Elloria's hand flew to her mouth and tears sprung to her eyes. "Then—Corin—?"

He nodded once, gravely. "Yes."

Elloria bit back a sob. "Oh, Corin. Oh god."

"I know," Dalrend said simply.

"But, listen, I mean, he could have escaped—he wasn't stupid, maybe he even left camp—"

But Dalrend was shaking his head. "They found bodies, Hallen. I'm sorry."

She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream, but her voice was still hoarse. So she settled for saying, in a small, hard voice, "I hate this."

Dalrend shrugged. "It is what it is. We're here now, not much we can do about it for the time being. Lightblood says that once we're all better we'll go back to Telogrus. Lady Windrunner will teach us." He looked at her uncomfortably and added, "Things will… be all right, Hallen. For now, you should sleep. Heal."

Having no other real choice, Elloria stood, her legs shaky. "Okay. Okay." She turned towards the door and sighed, her hand on the handle. "And… thank you for this."

"Of course." There was some emotion rippling under his words that she couldn't place, but it wasn't as though that was anything particularly new. The man always had some kind of brood going. She left and before she knew it she was in bed, waiting for sleep to descend on her. At least its darkness was familiar.

#

A week after she woke up, Elloria was feeling antsy. She wandered the hall of the inn's upper floor looking for Cyranos, but he seemed to be out. She stopped in front of Dalrend's door with a sigh. Well. He might be a snobbish morally suspect ranger who called her names, but he had been nice when she was freaking out. Probably because he thought she needed him and he was getting off from it, but nonetheless. Having lived a life that did not offer terribly many opportunities for it, she believed in gratitude. She knocked.

The door swung open, revealing one blue-glowing eye. Elloria felt herself start. She still wasn't used to their new appearances. "Hallen? What do you want?"

Elloria shrugged. "Stretch my legs. See what passes for a town among the Alliance dogs."

Dalrend rolled his eyes and opened the door completely so that he could lean on the frame. "Okay, Hallen, two things. First, I'm pretty sure your Common is at the very least a little… rusty? And second, they're not letting us leave."

Annoyed, Elloria shoved at the door, causing Brighthammer to lose his balance for a moment and glare at her. "They _who_ , Brighthammer? Anyway I'm not saying we gotta talk to them or anything. I just wanna walk."

"They the humans, Hallen. Our presence here is classified."

Elloria folded her arms and raised a defiant eyebrow. "Fuck do I care about classified? And who's gonna stop me?"

Dalrend jerked a finger past her shoulder with a pointed look. Following his gaze, Elloria turned and saw something move in the shadows. Narrowing her eyes, Elloria entered stealth. Her vision of the shadows enhanced, but she didn't need sight to know that another was hidden with her. She crept closer to the stairs, where she sensed the presence. Even if it was another rogue there, if she got close enough, she would be able to see him, if only briefly. The challenge was to get close enough to see without being seen herself.

She thought she saw something shift. A muscle move, or a hair slide out of place. She moved quicker now through the shadow realm—

"Fuck's sake, Hallen, _what_ are you thinking?" Dalrend hissed, snatching the edge of her shirt.

"Ow!" She twisted herself out of his grasp and demanded, "How'd you see me?" _kill him kill him kill him insolent he is a murderer—_

"I'm a ranger-captain of Quel'Thalas, idiot. I watched you go into stealth and all I had to do was keep watching you. But that's not the point!" He yanked her close again so his mouth was to her ear and growled, "If you try anything with their guard, you risk getting us all killed! What are they gonna think? We were Horde a week ago. We are here on _extreme_ sufferance. Most humans worship the Light, do you think they're happy having a bunch of void-addled sin'dorei about the place?"

 _killhimkillhim take his power for your own_ "I thought you said they didn't know we were here—"

He shook her a little and snapped, "The ones who _do_ know, you ridiculous girl! Including, by the way, _that_ guard."

"You _stop_ shaking me," she growled back, and whirled out of his grip once again. _Insolent_ She rubbed her arm, which ached where he'd grabbed it. _he is vile he is a betrayer kill him now and end his threat_ "Wasn't gonna do anything," she added sullenly. _kill him_

Dalrend rolled his eyes. "Oh of course not. I'm sure you were just going to politely ask the gentleman where the nearest powder room is, right?"

 _join us do not fight_ She shoved him again and muttered, "I know where the damn lavvy is, Brighthammer."

Whoever had been watching them materialized out of the shadows, revealing a youngish fair-haired human with an eyepatch. He looked between the two of them and asked, "Is there a problem here?" in surprisingly fluent Thalassian.

Elloria turned the most unconvincing smile in recorded history on the human and shook her head. "Oh of course not, thanks for checking in!" she said in a bright voice. "The Captain and I were just having a friendly little discussion."

The human looked at her dubiously. Actually, not just dubiously… there was real fear in his eyes. "Okay, well, just… keep a lid on it, all right?"

"Of course, sir," Dalrend answered smoothly, dragging Elloria into his room. "The young lady and I will sort ourselves out."

As he shut the door behind them Elloria was ready to _kill him_ claw his _kill him drink his power take it for your own we will guide you_ face off _kill him_. "What the fuck? Where the _hell_ do you get off, Brighthammer—"

He clapped his hands down on her shoulders, hard. "Hallen. Hallen. Elloria. Listen." He yanked one of her hands and put it in front of her face. Her hand was glowing black-violet with Void energies. As was the rest of her. "Oh," she said dully. As she watched, her Voidform dissipated, her skin returning to its now-normal violet. The voices ordering her to kill Brighthammer faded, becoming a mere mutter on the edge of her consciousness. Dalrend let her go and sighed. "Elloria, we don't understand these powers that well, but we know they respond to our emotions. When you are angry or tired or threatened, the Void takes you over. It empowers you, but it also makes you more susceptible to the whispers."

Elloria nodded, shaking a little. "I—heard—it told me to—"

Dalrend's glare melted and he rubbed her shoulder. "I know."

She hugged herself. "It wasn't ever like that before. I could hear them but it wasn't ever, _ever_ like that."

"I know." He sighed. "Also, I dragged you in here because I had an idea. If you're feeling that stir-crazy, maybe we could spar. That should let both of us work off some energy."

Elloria looked up at him and smiled grimly. "Sounds good. Especially 'cause I _really_ wanna hit something right now."

#

"Holy shit," Elloria wheezed. She hauled herself off the floor and avoided Dalrend's smug gaze. Her whole body was sore. She wandered over to his lavvy and turned on the sink, letting the water pool in her cupped hands. "Fuck they teach you at those farstrider enclaves?"

"How to fight," said Dalrend, a smirk in his voice. "I will admit I threw in a few extra moves I learned in the field. And that a few of your little bar-fight moves caught me off-guard."

"How do you know and why do you assume that I learned those moves in bar fights?" asked Elloria, splashing water on her face.

Brighthammer laughed. "Just figured that temper of yours would have gotten you in some trouble a time or two."

"Temper? What temper?" said Elloria in a singsong voice. "I am a perfectly equanimitous… person," she finished lamely, sauntering out of the bathroom.

"Right," said Dalrend, raising an amused brow at her, "and do you know that almost every time I've touched you, you've tried to hit me?"

Elloria flinched. "You'd strike first too if you'd spent your time in the company I've done," she muttered darkly. Answering the question she saw in his face, she added, "Look, bloodthistle fiends and mana addicts are not exactly the most reliable people, nor are they particularly good at keeping their hands to themselves."

"Right. And who was it who was selling them the drugs in the first place?" Dalrend replied, his voice light.

"Excuse me?" Elloria marched right up to Dalrend, radiating anger. "You got some kind of point you wanna make?"

Dalrend shrugged, his face carefully neutral. "Just that one should take responsibility for one's actions."

"I'm sorry, what? I do, Brighthammer, believe me. What the hell was I supposed to do? Starve?" Her eyes narrowed to slits and she murmured, "And what about you, eh? Nobody knows _your_ story. What'd you do to get settled with Umbric and his lot, hmm?"

Rage spasmed across his features, but it was soon replace with a sarcastic rictus. "You really want to know, Elloria?"

"Yes!" she hissed. "Since you're so keen to judge, let's see your dirty laundry!"

"Fine. I was at Theramore." Elloria paused, wrong-footed. The name sounded familiar, but, well, before she'd left for the expedition, she hadn't really followed the news. Anything that happened outside of Quel'Thalas usually escaped her notice, to put it lightly. Seeing her confusion, Dalrend heaved a disgusted sigh and said, "I helped Garrosh Hellscream drop a mana bomb on a city full of innocents." Elloria didn't move, still trying to process his words. They wouldn't fit in her head. Dalrend's face changed. She thought she caught a fleeting expression of—hurt? Grief? Offense?—before it twisted into a mask of sinister pride. He grinned hauntingly at her and he said, "I spied for the Warchief. I mapped the isle's defenses. When the time came to kill, I helped to spirit Thalen Songweaver, who created the bomb, onto a goblin vessel. We stabilized the bomb and then we flew over Theramore and we dropped it. We killed thousands." He leaned in close, an eerie light in his eyes. "And you know what? I regret none of it. I—"

Elloria slapped him. They stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Finally she said, "I don't think that's true, Brighthammer, that you don't regret it, but you're a creep for saying it anyway."

Now he was furious, his nostrils actually flaring. "I don't! And I paid for it, oh yes, I paid. The Regency actually put me on trial. I had to go and justify serving _the Warchief_ to Lor'themar Theron. My career—"

Elloria closed her eyes and said, very deliberately, "I'm not surprised, Dalrend. And I don't blame you. You're a coward. You don't have the spine or the balls to defy Garrosh Hellscream." Then she turned around and left the room.

#

"Elloria, you must take more care," said Cyranos, munching on his slice of brie. He had returned from Telogrus, as it happened, and brought her some Stormwind brie to share. Still unsettled, she'd related the tense moment between herself and Dalrend.

"I know, I know," she moaned, "I know, but it's just—sometimes I think I could almost, like, tolerate him, and then he goes and says something nasty, and—!" she threw her hands in the air.

Cyranos shook his head. "No, sincerely, Elloria. If either of you loses control for just a moment too long—and that is likely, given that neither of you has had much training—you risk not only your own lives, but the lives all around you." He popped the rest of the cheese into his mouth, steepled his fingers, and stared at her thoughtfully for a long moment. "In fact, I think it may be time for both of you to return to Telogrus."

Quietly, Elloria asked, "And what will happen when we get there?"

Cyranos smiled beatifically. "The best thing. You'll learn."


End file.
